It is important to bear in mind that the struggle has never from beginning to end been one which divided the nation as a whole into two hostile camps.  Public opinion, when it has not been indifferent, has swayed now to one side and now to the other, according as it was stirred by some flagrant act of oppression on the part of the bureaucracy or some outrageous act of terrorism on the part of the revolutionaries.  The truth is that the civil war in Russia—­for it was nothing less—­was confined to quite a narrow section of society.  It has been said that there are practically speaking no class distinctions in the English sense of the word, in Russia; there is, however, a very real distinction between the intelligentsia and the peasants.  The intelligentsia are the few million educated Russians who control, or seek to control, the destinies of the 145 million uneducated tillers of the soil.  There is nothing quite like them in this country, though the expression “the professional class” describes them in part.  Broadly speaking, they are people who have passed through school and university, and can therefore lay claim to a certain amount of culture; their birth is a matter of no moment, they may be the children of peasants or of noblemen.  It is from this “class,” if we can call it so, that both the bureaucracy and the revolutionary movement draw their recruits.  The real tragedy of Russia is that neither the party of reform nor the party of reaction shares, or even understands, the outlook and ideals of the people.  Russian culture is still so comparatively recent that it has not yet passed out of the imitative stage; and, in spite of the work of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoieffsky, the books that are read and studied in Russia are for the most part translations from foreign authors.  The result is that the political and social ideas of the intelligentsia are almost wholly derived from countries whose structure is totally different from their own.  We shall presently see that this fact had an important bearing on the development of the outbreak of 1905.  It is sufficient here to notice that the struggle was one between two sections of the intelligentsia, political idealism against political stagnation, the Red Flag versus Red Tape.

After twenty years of bureaucratic government the country as a whole began to grow once again restless.  In this period a proletariate had come into being.  It was a mere drop in the bucket of 145 millions of peasants, but its voice was heard in the towns, and it was steeped in the Marxian doctrines of Social Democracy.  Moreover the peasants themselves had their grievances.  They cared nothing and understood less of the political theories which the revolutionaries assiduously preached among them, but they pricked up their ears when the agitators began to talk about land and taxation.  Up to 1861 the peasants had been serfs, the property, with the land on which they lived, of the landowner.  At their emancipation